The Past That May Become Our Future

When I was in library school twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by the acclaimed children’s writer Katherine Paterson, who observed that historical fiction says as much about the society in which it is published as the society about which it is written. This thought occurred to me as I read Ellen Levine’s new young adult novel In Trouble.

Six years ago, the large corporate publisher Viking Penguin published Levine’s middle grade novel Catch a Tiger by the Toe. Catch a Tiger by the Toe takes place in New York City in 1953, during the McCarthy era. Thirteen-year old Jamie Morse feels like “all I ever do is lie” because she cannot tell her friends, classmates, or anyone else that her parents and all of her relatives are either current or former Communists. At one point, a man asks her what magazines her parents read. Knowing right away that the stranger is with the FBI, she does not tell him. While her close-knit family gives her and her younger brother love and support, the strains of being political outlaws are evident. Unable to invite anyone to her house, she tells best friend Elaine that her beloved grandmother, a spry Jewish immigrant from Russia whose stories give Jamie and her brother a sense of history and moral direction, is on her deathbed. Her father’s brother, Uncle George, slides into alcoholism because of the stress. He, Jamie’s father, and their older brother who was killed in action in the Second World War grew up in an orphanage and were forced to work for their bread at a young age, but their desire to live in a country where children don’t grow up with such deprivation has turned them into pariahs at best and criminals at worst—even though they have never committed an act of violence and their only “crime” is one of thought.

In Trouble takes place three years later, in 1956 when Jamie is 16. Her father is getting out of jail for refusing to testify to a Congressional committee. However, Levine’s focus is not on the suppression of political thought and speech at that time but on the legal constraints that affected women and girls in the United States. In addition to being shut out of the best-paying careers and forced to depend on their husbands, women had little control over their own bodies. Contraception and pregnancy tests required proof of marriage; abortion was strictly forbidden.

In Trouble portrays with honesty and accuracy the underside of women’s lives in the 1950s, so much so that the author got “in trouble” when she tried to find a publisher for this sequel to Catch a Tiger by the Toe. The six-year interval between the two novels is perhaps a clue that the new one was a hard sell in these increasingly reactionary times, as is the fact that the novel came out not from a major New York publisher but from Minneapolis-based independent Carolrhoda, a division of educational publisher Lerner Publishing. Levine describes her struggle to find a publisher in an article for Hunger Mountain: http://www.hungermtn.org/when-along-with-her-characters-an-author-gets-in-trouble/. Why the difficulty? Because Levine’s teenage protagonist obtains an illegal abortion.

Jamie’s friend Elaine has recently moved from the Bronx to Long Island, but Elaine has a big problem—she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child and her boyfriend won’t answer her letters or return her phone calls. Then Jamie herself is raped by a Beatnik acquaintance of her older cousin and misses her period twice. Jamie’s efforts to find out if she is, in fact, pregnant and to terminate the pregnancy in the socially repressive 1950s (she has to ask old friend Paul to pose as her husband to get a test) reveals the impact of the hard-won victories of the 1960s that, as Mickie clearly lays out in her previous post, may soon be lost.

Levine avoids graphic detail in her description of either the rape or the abortion, which is performed in a clinic rather than a back alley or hotel room. As in her earlier novel she succeeds in portraying controversial politics while maintaining strong characterizations and story development. Jamie is complex and likable—still a practiced liar who wishes she could tell the truth. Elaine’s illusions about the baby’s father coming to marry her are realistic and poignant, as is Jamie’s boyfriend, Paul, forced to deal with the fact that his girlfriend has been impregnated by a rapist. Like Levine’s earlier novel, In Trouble immerses readers in a time and place that may yet become a reality again.

Disclosure: I bought Catch a Tiger by the Toe at a used bookstore. It is, sadly, out of print. I read In Trouble as an e-galley provided by the publisher, and I hope Carolrhoda has plans to reissue Levine’s earlier work as well.

2 Responses

Lyn, Thanks for your book recommendation. I think that both women’s rights and civil liberties to protest and dissent are clearly under attack again in the United States.

My Aunt Sylvia was a trained public health nurse in the “bad old days” when it was so hard for women to obtain contraception. She’s now deceased but she’s shared many stories of her work with women and families in the poor neighborhoods of New York City. She was someone who helped to change the “rules” about contraception when there were still some of the barriers that you describe. She was another pioneer when the Sangers were being prosecuted for such work.

Women today need to be aware of the hard fought rights that they gained. It seems that’s the only way that we’ll continue to have them in the face of a new attempt to merge the ideas of right wing Christian fundamentalism with legislative actions.

People tend to take their freedoms for granted, and for the most part the trend in U.S. history has been toward more freedom and inclusion. Yet there have been notable exceptions, some taking the form of temporary hysterias–the Palmer Raids and McCarthyism being good examples–and some taking the form of a more permanent stripping of rights. The most notable example of the latter was the end of Reconstruction, which initiated a decades-long process through which African Americans lost land, jobs, and freedoms by means of physical attacks and terror, legislation, and ultimately the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson.

I have a hard time believing that an advanced industrial nation will resort to the kind of repression of women more characteristic of semi-feudal developing nations with powerful official state religions or paranoid dictatorships where those in power demand reproduction for their warped conception of national survival.

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